This is my favorite suggestion: Take a nap! Most of us don’t get enough sleep, so this should be an easy win. And with many more of us working from home now, it should be relatively easy to schedule a meeting with ourselves so we won’t be interrupted. But how can napping help us to learn?
Studies show that lack of sleep can prevent your ability to learn effectively. Also, during sleep our brains optimize the connections we made during our learning. And reviewing something you learned just before going to sleep will help you retain it better.
Some years ago, Rich Hickey (the inventor of Clojure) did a presentation called “Hammock Driven Development” where he shares his system for solving complex problems. In a nutshell you look over a problem you need to solve and write down, as clearly as possible, the parameters of the problem. Also write down what “solved” would look like for the problem. Then go to sleep and let your unconscious mind connect the two. It usually doesn’t happen overnight, but over a few days, or sometimes weeks, you can come up with a clever solution to your problem.
So that’s all about our regular sleep time. What about this nap thing? Well, it turns out that some of the greatest minds in history insisted on taking a nap during the workday; Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein to name a few. Based on some psychological research Ari Meisel created an app called Peaktime that helps you to determine the time of day when you are most effective. This is the time of day when we are able to learn more quickly and solve problems more easily. It turns out that, for most people, this is about 1.5 – 2.5 hours after waking up. So, by taking a nap, you can have an extra peak effectiveness time during your day.
The ideal length of time for a nap should be 20-30 minutes. Any longer and you risk sleeping too deeply and then you’ll be groggy and won’t sleep as well at nighttime. But if you combine peak times with taking a nap, you can learn something at your early peak time, take a nap to increase the retention of that learning, and then later in the day lock it in during a second peak time. That is a massive win!
What time of day would you be able to set aside for a power nap?